(And not just because he’s the most beautiful 王女)
As I mentioned in the inaugural post of this blog, when I was 22 years old I was diagnosed with acute viral myocarditis and nearly died. Not exactly the most subtle entry, but I promise there’s a connection here between my illness and our beautiful pink haired striker.
Leading up to this diagnosis, I had been a competitive bodybuilder for going on 4 years. I had achieved some amount of success by becoming Mr. Rocky Mountain, and was well on my way to becoming a top level national competitor as well. By then, it had already consumed my entire life. I loved bodybuilding. I won’t argue that it was healthy for me, far from it. It was maybe the most toxic thing I have yet chosen to pursue with my time (there’s still time for a new era of toxic Jordan), and yet it gave me purpose. It gave me a vehicle through which I could focus my body and mind towards a goal that felt like it had meaning, regardless of how devoid of true meaning it may have actually been.
When I checked into the emergency room at 2 in the morning, unable to breathe, feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest, exhibiting every heart attack symptom in the book, I knew long before the cardiologist ever entered the room that this chapter of my life was over. That is, if I managed to survive at all.
I emphasize the doubt around surviving because, at the time, my ejection fraction was about 25%. Which, for the medically inclined in the room, you’ll recognize as catastrophic. This basically refers to the amount of blood that is cleared from the chambers in your heart per pump. A significant portion (usually around 60% for someone my age) should be leaving and pumping through the various chambers. My heart was effectively pumping whisks of smoke rather than rivers of blood.
I will never forget the feeling of them performing an angiogram while I was wide awake, the catheter sliding in through the incision in my wrist, the warmth of the blood pooling around me as I bled, though I couldn’t feel any pain due to the local anesthetic. I could, however, feel the microscopic camera wiggling through the map of veins and arteries in my arm, ultimately landing in my heart. I had begged them to put me under, begged them to stop the pain. I was turned to face the screen, so I could see the images being carried out of my body electronically and blown up in front of me. It was like being at a special late night showing of a recording of my own death. But, I survived.
The next morning, when the cardiologist entered the room, the look on his face told me everything I needed to know before he even spoke. And then:
”If things don’t change, you’ll need a heart transplant. You’re never going to compete again.”
Now, at this point, you’d think that would knock some sense into me, right? Wrong. Remember: I was a 22 year old ‘roided out meathead hell bent on becoming a professional bodybuilder. So his words only lit a fire under my ass to prove him wrong. The doctor, the Universe, my family, my then fiancé, they may all have been SCREAMING at me that it was time to hang it up. To move on. But now I had a point to prove.
The thing about viral heart infections is that, assuming you live long enough for the virus to clear and the inflammation subsides, the heart can actually make a full recovery. I had no structural damage. No holes. No tears. No clogs. I just had a heart that was refusing to work in the way that a heart actually should.
So, once my heart started doing normal heart things again, I promptly returned to the gym. I tried to get back into the life I had known before all of this. That was impossible. Everything had changed.
Every heartbeat, every movement in the gym, every foreign or somewhat abnormal sensation in my body triggered a palpable wave of panic.
“Is it happening again?”
“What’s wrong this time?” ”Can I even trust being in my own skin?” ”Will I ever feel safe again?”
But because I was hell bent on proving this doctor wrong, on proving to myself that I could still live a life that in my heart of hearts (pun intended) I knew would never be attainable, I still showed up. I still pushed my body in the gym. I still ate my meals. I still tried. But every single day, the panic built. While I did eventually give up pursuing bodybuilding, I never entirely gave up physical fitness. Whether it was weight training, jiu jitsu, running, hiking, CrossFit, boxing, MMA, you name it, I tried it. I think I was looking for something that I could really sink my teeth into again. Something physical that also allowed me to feel safe in my own body again. But by failing to address the root cause of trauma, I just kept exacerbating the fear trapped in my cells.
The body keeps the score, as they say.
Eventually, it got to the point where I would wake up every single day and the first thought that entered my mind before I even opened my eyes would be “I’m going to die. My heart is going to stop, or hurt, or skip a beat, and I’m going to die.” I would do something as benign as drop a fork and bend over to pick it up, and the act of bending over would trigger the same thought loop. Almost every moment of everyday: ”I’m going to die. My heart is going to stop. I am not safe.”
When was the fear the worst, though? It was at its worst whenever I was pursuing something that I loved the most. It became a giant red alarm, a code red: stay away from anything that lights your heart on fire. Stay away from anything that sparks your passion and inspires you to get after it. It turns out that I had internalized the trauma I had experienced as something that was caused by my passion. That pushing myself to my edge, physically or otherwise, is what caused my heart to fail.
This belief gradually caused my heart to fail in an entirely different way. There was just no spark anymore.
It became nigh on impossible to focus on anything other than the fear that was omnipresent in my body and in my mind. The only thing that kept me going, in hindsight, was a desperate belief that eventually things wouldn’t feel this way anymore. That somehow, someway I would feel normal again. That I would feel like Jordan again. That I could once again pursue things without fear, without anxiety, without dread.
That relief did eventually start to come after an absolute metric shit ton of therapy, EMDR, psychedelic experiences, and completely changing my attitude towards health and fitness. All of which could be a blog post on their own… but what was really the icing on the proverbial therapy cake was Episode 7 of an anime called BlueLock.
Enter Chigiri.
For the entirety of this anime about fueling your ego, pushing yourself to your limits, destroying your understanding of your capabilities and rebuilding them anew but bigger and bolder, Chigiri is effectively a giant pink squeegee of “nope” energy. He has all but given up on soccer after tearing his right ACL at the peak of his career, and while this injury is now only spiritual in nature, it shuts him down before he can even begin. Much like me.
Over the course of Episode 7‘s run time specifically, Chigiri is wrestling with why the people around him are still trying so hard. He is begging them to just concede and lose the match so that he can finally give up on himself. He can finally give up on his dreams. The thing about BlueLock is that if your team loses at this stage in the game, you’re out too. So if the team loses, Chigiri doesn’t even have to accept responsibility for giving up. He can just move on and blame everyone else. He’ll finally be able to go gently into that long dark night without looking back.
The fact is, Chigiri is looking for the same excuse that I was. He’s leaning on his torn ACL as the evidence and proof as to why he can’t live a life of meaning or passion anymore. His perpetual fear of re-injuring his leg is actually a much deeper fear of still being able to live up to his expectations for himself and to his goals, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He is literally chained inside the prison of his own mind, looking for an excuse to finally be at peace with this now catastrophically small definition of life that he has left available for himself. Even though he knows he is meant for so much more.
As he watches the protagonist, Isagi, fight harder and harder as the time remaining in the match becomes shorter and shorter, something inside of him starts to snap. The show literally visualizes the metaphorical chains wrapped around his leg starting to snap as he watches the intensifying passion of this egoist in front of him. And then, the moment comes.
Chigiri realizes in that moment that the thing he’s actually afraid of isn’t hurting his leg. Or not being able to play soccer anymore. He realizes that the only thing he’s afraid of is losing his passion. And that the only way to keep that passion alive is by playing his absolute hardest, despite whatever fear and doubt might try to chain him down.
The only way out, as they say, is through.
We hear Chigiri utter: “もいい” and then his chains break, and he’s off, revealing his true form as a striker: he’s the fastest player in all of Japan.
This scene cracked the code to a problem that I had been wrestling with for over 6 years at this point: “How do I continue to pursue the things I care about in this life fully, knowing full well that it could be taken from me at any time?“
By choosing not to pursue something fully, it’s been taken from you before you’ve even started. Everything in this fragile lifetime of ours is ephemeral and temporary, no matter what we do. So we can either choose out entirely and let life pass us by.
Or we can choose to fight for the things that make us feel like this fragile life is worth something more.
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